To brush up summarily, nuclear terrorism comprises two kinds of
threats. First is actually nuclear explosions based on nuclear fission.
The second is the “dirty bomb” threat, where a conventional explosion,
probably small, disperses radioactive contaminants. The first threat is
obviously the most catastrophic, since it contemplates a bomb probably
at least the size of Hiroshima (perhaps a bit smaller) going off in a
large city. The second would likely cause few casualties but could make
significant areas economically unusable for years.

I grew up during the Cold War, and was living in the DC area during
the Cuban Missile Crisis, ground zero. Mutually assured destruction
staved off nuclear Armageddon during the Cold War, but would not prevent
a attack by a terrorist, and sounds all too “easy” for a terrorist (not
necessarily just Al Qaeda) to pull off.

Allison goes over a variety of ways that a terrorist could
manufacture a crude device, or detonate a stolen small weapon (a
shoulder-fired weapon or a so-called “suitcase nuke”). Such small nukes,
ready to use, exist at least in Pakistan, and were Musharraf’s
government to fall to extremists, the United States would have to
intervene militarily just to secure the weapons. And many of them in
Russia or the former Soviet republics could have fallen into the wrong
hand during the economic chaos since the fall of the Soviet Union. These
are likely to be much harder to detonate. However, Graham provides some
discussion of the ‘ease” of making a crude device (I won’t repeat the
details here) and cites a study done in 1977 by Princeton college
student John Aristotle Phillips on the availability of the necessary
materials from unregulated and unclassified sources. Such a device (if
designed for a 10 megaton yield, as below) would be somewhat larger,
maybe the size of a refrigerator, and could fit in a typical rental
truck for household moves. A terrorist would be satisfied with one or
two crude devices, in comparison to a state which would want reliable
weapons to implement a foreign policy. This observation apparently
explains why states take so long to develop nuclear weapons programs in
comparison to what terrorist organizations might do.

The results of such a blast would be grisly. For a typical crude 10
mgton device, a radius of about 1/3 mile would be vaporized, and ¾ miles
would have major building collapses, and up to 1-1/2 miles would be
uninhabitable because of fires and radiation, as well as the EMP
(electromagnetic or e-bomb) effect that could fry all electronics for
some distance. The reader can visit his
blastmaps link. In New York City, a device near Times Square on a
business day would cause about one million deaths. Of course, during my
stint in the Pentagon in the Army in 1968, I recall reading far more
grisly scenarios of major hydrogen bomb blasts contemplated by a nuclear
exchange with the Soviets.

Furthermore, a lead-shielded nuclear device might be difficult to
detect with radiation detectors now in use in some major cities. Allison
discusses the potential for diversion of bombs or fissionable materials
in detail, including within the United States by corruption or even
direct attack.. My general impression is that this sort of incident is,
fortunately, more difficult to pull off than the author makes it look.

The dirty bomb gets less attention in the book, although it has from
other sources, like PBS documentaries. Al Qaeda has always looked for
spectacular destruction and casualties. But it would seem that a
carefully executed and sinister plan of small radiological explosions
with sufficiently toxic contaminants could make much real property
(especially residential units in cities) worthless and undermine the
entire real estate market in many areas of the country. A larger dirty
bomb with a highly toxic, though hard-to-handle contaminant like
Strontium 90 (a PBS documentary once covered an incident with loose
Strontium found in the former Soviet republic Georgia) could make
several square miles of a large city uninhabitable for centuries.

Allison also points out that the 9-11 hijackers could have caused
much bigger catastrophes by flying their planes into nuclear power
plants and breaking containment domes, or, worse, buildings than house
spent fuel rods. On October 11, 2001 the United States was faced with
an apparent “false alarm” called Dragonfly, in which there were reports
of Al Qaeda’s possession of a bomb stolen from Russia in New York City.

Allison’s “prevention” consists of three “no’s” and seven “yeses” as
diplomatic steps. Generally, there is nothing surprising in his
recommendations. He says that the United States does not lose gold from
Fort Knox (the movie 1964 “Goldfinger” notwithstanding), so it should be
worldwide with nuclear materials. That sort of reasoning forms the basis
of his contention that such an incident is still preventable, although
his steps would take years of delicate diplomacy (regardless of who wins
any presidential election) to implement. The most serious specific
threat may be North Korea, and Allison recommends a carrot and stick
approach, with military intervention if necessary. He is critical of
President Bush’s haste with Iraq, although I would speculate that Saddam
Hussein could have been trafficking materials stolen from the remains of
the Soviet Union as well as preparing to make nuclear devices
himself—hence maybe no WMD’s would be found.

It would take a number of years to implement Graham Allison’s ideas.
In the meantime, we would remain at risk of an unimaginable catastrophe
at all times. If even one nuclear weapon went off in a large city,
without the reassurance that a future event could be prevented, then I
wonder if our financial system could remain intact. One of a very small
number of nuclear blasts could decapitate the government or major
infrastructure. Outside of a couple of episodes on ABC “Nightline” and
some scary columns by Charles Krauthammer, there seems to be little
overt public discussion over whether a free society could survive months
or years of homeland marital law. Certainly people used to depending on
technology and self-expression rather than interaction with other people
would be in a bad way. I wonder if the world that was left would have
any use for an intellectual “sissy” like me. I do recall a scary campus
underground black-and-white film called “The War Game” (not to be
confused with the hit 1983 film “War Games”) dating back to Vietnam days
of 1967, when a second Cuban missile crisis type scenario is dramatized,
along with the fallout of citizens who have no lives they understand to
look forward to in the aftermath. “I don’t want to do nothin’,” was one
line. Unlike 9/11, as shocking as that day was, repeated nuclear
terrorism can bring down a civilization, and it might comport with a
Sayy-Qutb-driven idea of jihadist “virtue.”

Graham Allison summarized his argument (especially the “three No’s”)
in an article in the March 2005 The American Prospect: “The
Gravest Prospect: The president who invaded Iraq citing fear of nuclear
blackmail has been cavalier about preventing it elsewhere.” The article
focuses some attention on Putin and loose nukes (and raw materials) in
Russia.

I’ll note here that an online discussion of the nuclear threat by me
at my site (a chapter from my second DADT book) was hacked in April
2002, an disturbing incident never fully explained.

On September 12, 2004, “CNN Presents” aired a program called “Nuclear
Terror” hosted by Aaron Brown. Graham Allison’s book was discussed and
Graham was interviewed, as was Stephen E. Flynn, author of America
the Vulnerable: How our Government Is Failing to Protect Us from
Terrorism (Harper Collins, ISBN 0060571284, July, 2004). Flynn
argues that the real Trojan horse for nuclear terrorism is the entire
shipping chain, often starting in southeast Asia or near Hong Kong. Drug
dealing can conceal the transfer of arms, including tactical suitcase
nuclear weapons or HEU uranium. North Korea is likely to be tempted into
selling nuclear materials into the black market, and they may be stolen
from various weak points, especially in Russia. If the government even
found credible evidence of one nuclear weapon being smuggled, all
shipping could be stopped for two or three weeks to find it, leading to
economic catastrophe. Tracking shipping needs to have as high a priority
as tracking aircraft. Another comment was that the actuarial life
expectancy of residents in Manhattan and some of Washington, DC may be
reduced by the expected cumulative probability of a nuclear detonation
eventually. For the company that I retired from at the end of 2001 (ING
ReliaStar) this sounds like a big deal, potentially, since that company
took a big hit from its reinsurance in the World Trade Center.

Subodh Atal provides an article in the April 25, 2005 The American
Conservative, “Nuclear Option: Terrorists don’t need state
sponsorship to visit atomic devastation on America.” Atal imagines a
scenario where at noon EDT on Tues. Sept. 13, 2005 Hiroshima-sized
atomic bombs go off in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago and abort but
spew radiation in Washington and Atlanta. He believes that terrorists
could smuggle subcritical masses of HEU (highly enriched uranium) into
the country and assemble bombs here, and that this is a greater risk
that the explosion of stolen suitcase nukes. He criticizes the Bush
neo-conservative policy of “democracy at gunpoint” being imposed
especially on Iraq, as a catalyst for terrorists, who often operate in
open European cities.

Richard
Rhodes has an article “Living with the Bomb” in the August 2005
National Geographic. He gives different numbers for the destruction
radius for different kinds of weapons, with a diagram on p. 110. For a
Hiroshima-type HEU bomb, total destruction takes place for 0.8 miles;
for a hydrogen bomb, 2.2 miles, and for a suitcase nuke, 0.15 miles
(something comparable to the World Trade Center attack; but radiation
contamination would still be catastrophic).

The author introduced this book on a segment of Anderson Cooper's 360
(Feb. 20, 2007) on CNN, described at this
blogger link. The author sees the occurrence of disasters as
inevitable and a continuum, with terrorism constituting just one kind of
catastrophe among many natural possibilities. He does propose a number
of scenarios:

(1) terrorists drive trucks into the Sunoco facility
near Citizens Bank Stadium in Philadelphia, releasing hydrogen fluoride
gas during a baseball game

(2) terrorists attack liquefied natural gas
(LNG) tankers in the ports of Boston and Long Beach.

(3) An earthquake
shreds the levees in the California valley, flooding more people than
did Katrina.

(4) As well publicized already, a major avian flu pandemic.

(5)
Further major meltdowns of the nation's power grid.

He does not see these as civilization ending events, as the Cuban
Missile Crisis might have been. He believes that high value targets can
be made safer by increasing background surveillance, making preparations
all the more tedious. He does not see softer targets as attractive. He
probably could give more attention to the nuclear threat, or explore the
economic havoc (especially with urban real estate) that a dirty bomb
could pose if a large populated area were made permanently
uninhabitable. These grim possibilities have already been widely
discussed by others, including Mr. Allison, above.

He sees the "just in time" nature and excessive bottom-line focus of
business as the major Achilles heel. He builds his arguments around a
concept of strategic redundancy and resilience, with private and
government partnerships, probably a concept finding more appeal among
Democrats. Certainly his paradigm is useful for dealing with topics like
global warming, pandemics, and even making the power grid and cyber
infrastructure even more redundant and unbreakable. (He offers an
interesting example of the Alaska pipeline, which is cut by the Soviets
in the 1982 thriller "World War III".) He offers a metaphor
for the changing nature of capitalism: from a sand dune, that never
loses its form, to a skyscraper, that could be knocked down. I recall
now a roommate when I was in graduate school at the University of Kansas
(in the 1960s) who felt that it was "immoral" for people to live bottled
up in big cities.

Probably the author should pay more attention to asymmetry and the
role of individuals or very small groups. That has already become a
lesson of 9/11. Personal preparedness can depend partly of family and
community solidarity, which has been weakened in an era of individual
sovereignty -- a concept that can ironically unravel because other
disgruntled people attack the technological infrastructure upon which
individualism now depends, or, more likely (he is right that "nature"
can still be the ultimate "terrorist"), an external natural event does
so.

I recall a 1950s Parker Brothers board game called "Star
Reporter," which considered a "disaster" less horrible than a
"catastrophe," which ended the game.

CNN
"Special Investigations Unit" with Anderson Cooper presented "Edge of
Disaster" on April 29, 2007, with particular attention to dirty bombs,
LNG, smallpox, power grids, and floods (here, near Sacramento CA, in
conjunction with an earthquake and weak levees).

Randall J. Larsen, Colonel, USAF (Ret).
Our Own Worst Enemy: Asking the Right Questions About Security to
Protect You, Your Family, and America. New York: Grand Central
Publishing, 2007. ISBN 0-446-58043-0, 302 pages, indexed, hardcover,
Foreword and 10 Chapters. The author, director of the Institute for
Homeland Security, presents a sobering picture of our vulnerability to a
determined enemy. He uses a Drake equation to predict the likelihood of
severe damage to our way of life from various threats, with the nuclear
and biological threats being by far the worst. (The tends to pooh-pooh
the extreme economic chaos -- like with real estate values -- that a
dirty bomb attack in a major city might cause.) A determined bioterror
attack might be the most difficult to stop. He takes a sidetrip to
examine the anthrax letters in the fall of 2001, and offers evidence
that they were associated with 9/11 and Al Qaeda, and not from the
domestic source suggested by the FBI, which has a build in interest in
criminal prosecution. (Along those lines, it's good to look at David
Tell 's article "Remember Anthrax" from The Weekly Standard,
April 2002, link
here.)

What Colonel Larsen proposes is a conceptual
paradigm. Horrific attacks have to be stopped strategically, not
tactically. He is like a chess player who prefers positional openings
rather than gambits and quick attacks. The emphasis on the nuclear
threat has to rest overseas (Nunn and Allison would agree). He thinks
that domestic security should be overseen operationally and conceptually
by NGO's or quasi-agencies, with considerable citizen involvement,
expanding the usual volunteer programs (and even national service
agendas) to the level of conceptualization. He talks about bringing back
the concept of posse (not vigilante) in a modern sense. He does provide
considerable detailed advice to families, as to how they could "shelter
in place" even after a nuclear attack (not as in the movie "Right at
your Door"). Blogger
discussion.

David Armstrong and Joseph Trento.
America and the Islamic Bomb: The Deadly Compromise. A Project
of the National Security News Service. Hanover, New Hampshire:
Steerforth Press, 2007. ISBN 1-58642-137-9; 292 pages, hardcover, indexed with endnotes. Has
an Introduction, ten chapters, and Epilogue.

The book maintains that American administrations have been careless
with nuclear weapons policies, all the way back to the Truman days were
conceptual questions of how to deal with the Soviets existed at the
getgo. Ensuring developments, such as the Atoms for Peace program in the
50s, would actually encourage nuclear proliferation. In modern times,
current administrations (all the way back to Carter) have been careless
with Pakistan's nuclear program and with handling the A. Q. Khan nuclear
scandal. Later Reagan pretended to be denying Pakistan access to nuclear
technology and then looked the other way, during the Afghanistan and
Iran crises. The current administration has had to look the other way in
order to get Pakistan's (Musharraf 's) cooperation after 9/11.
There is some interesting discussion of connections in Libya (despite
Reagan's success in handling Libya) and even Dubai. As a result of all
of this, there are many contacts (between A. Q. Khan operatives,
including past) with Al Qaeda and other
potential terrorist outlets around the world. Blogger
discussion.

Brian Michael Jenkins.Will
Terrorists Go Nuclear? Amherst, New York: Prometheus,
2008. ISBN 978-1-59102-656-3. Hardcover, 457 pages, indexed. 4 Parts, 19
Chapters. A former Rand official traces the history of the
psychology of mass terrorism back to the early 1970s, when it was felt
that Communists could actually use terror tactics, as could
Palestinians. Thought experiments were conducted even then. The book is
somewhat equivocal, wary of the possible threat but often noting that it
is more difficult to pull off than supposed and maybe not as effective
sometimes. The Chechens almost exploded a dirty bomb in the 1990s.
Chapter 17, "A Brilliant Yellow Light" simulates a suitcase nuke attack
on New York City.
Blogger discussion.